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Recent Trends in Local SEO Guide to Boost Your Business

Ranking in the 3-pack was already challenging and with the passage of time, it will only be more and more difficult. Thus, it is better for local businesses to look beyond (local SEO)-3-Pack-ONLY strategy. The question is how to do that? Experienced SEO experts in India are of the opinion that to look beyond 3-pack local SEO strategies, it is important to know how local organic search has changed over the last one year. It will be easier to make the right moves, only after you are updated about those changes.

Therefore, read on to learn how local organic search has changed over the last few months.

Recent changes on local search: Every business wants to drive Google’s free traffic and thus, ranking in local 3-pack is becoming increasingly competitive with passing of each day. It is an open secret that Google now prioritises paid listings on SERPs for local searches. There are now as many as 4 ads on a SERP before visitors will reach your business listed in the 3-pack. Moreover, if a desktop user clicks on one of the 3-pack results, he or she lands on the local finder. Once, he/she reaches local finder, two paid local ads will be there on top of other businesses. Brands that participate in paid advertisements are assigned stars to their names by Google. Thus, those businesses enjoy certain advantages in driving potential customers as compared to the rest.

Don’t drift away from the focus: Every change brings in new opportunities and so, there is actually no need for you to feel disheartened. Just make little alterations in your existing strategy and reap the profits that the new opportunities offer. Actually, it is more important to get rid of that tunnel vision that ranking in the 3-pack is the ultimate objective. The main objective of your business is to drive more customers and not securing a position in the 3-pack local search results.

Consider the following factors to boost visitors to your website:

Which competitor websites enjoy greater visibility for the similar keywords and topics?

You can be least assured that a large number of visitors are also clicking on the links that rank in local searches. STAT is a useful tool that helps tracking specific keywords, along with ranking of businesses based on those keywords. Moreover, it also shows the percentage of online visibility those businesses enjoy in their specific markets.

Are the customers using voice search?

Modern Smartphones have the in-built feature of voice search. Thus, an increasing number of searchers are using the voice search facility, while looking for products or services related to that of yours acrosss the Internet. In other words, this trend denotes local searches are no more confined to the 3-pack. Typical queries for pizza may include:

Who makes the best pizza in Kolkata?

Which is the nearest pizza place?

Where’s the closest pizza outlet near me?

Who makes the best pizza in Kolkata?

Do not ignore voice search in your local SEO strategy to drive more visitors to the website.

Is your website properly optimised for “near me” searches?

“Near me” searches are steadily becoming popular in the recent times. Customers are simply looking for their desired products or services nearer their homes. Thus, it is a good strategy to optimise your website for “near me” searches to increase the number of visitors and boost the ranking of your business’ GMB (Google My Business) page.

Should you invest in paid advertisements?

To play it safe, your website should not only have high ranking in both organic and local search results but also gain prominence in paid advertisements. All these three factors when combined together, provide the best mileage.

Are you ignoring featured snippets?

Featured snippets are helpful optimising your website for local searchers. Based on the targeted market, your business can gain lot of visibility by prioritising on featured snippets. Unfortunately, most businesses ignore this factor and thus, fail to boost their online prominence.

Tips to enjoy more visibility online: Local SEO is not rocket science and you can actually boost your conversion rate and profit margin through local customers. A boost in ranking without boost in conversion is actually meaningless. Here are some tips for improving both visibility and conversion for your site.

Get a fast-loading website: Remember, Google reduces visibility of slower websites. Invest into a SEO-friendly website that gets loaded within the ninetieth percentile on Google Page Speed Insight. GTMetrix is a helpful tool to understand how fast your website gets loaded for users.

Make sure your website is in proper health: Your website may also suffer because of crawl errors of bots. Use tools like Google’s Search Console and Moz Pro to monitor your site’s health, domain health and crawl issues from time to time. Sites that have high scores and less errors are given priority over others by Google on local search results.

Follow a strong strategy for review generation: Review offers a lot of benefits and it will be a blunder to ignore routine reviews of your website. Recently, Google has started giving review scores to websites, based on any number of reviews that a website has undergone. The more number of reviews, the higher are the chances of increasing your site’s CTR.

Do not ignore the importance of links: Manipulative links are no more relevant to boost prominence of websites. But that does not mean that high-quality links are irrelevant too. Specially, for highly competitive business domains or particular location-specific campaigns, the anchor text plays a crucial role. Thus, focus on generating high-quality links from high-authority websites.

Focus of relevant and high-authority citations: Although popularity of citations is going downhill at present, but still relevant and high-authority citations do play an important role. They help generating high-quality links for authoritative websites. Even high-authority, unstructured citations can provide sufficient mileage to your campaign.

The ongoing 2017 will certainly be volatile for local search, as practices and strategies will keep changing frequently. But, if you can manage to stay focused and innovative, experimenting with diverse strategies, it is more likely for your brand to get more business from local customers.